CUTTHROATS
Cutthroats was Infocom's 13th game and was written by Michael Berlin (the
author of Suspended and Infidel), and Jerry Wolper.
You are an experienced diver who wants to search an old shipwreck site (close
to Hardscrabble Island) for treasure. Organize your efforts and seek fame and
fortune underwater. Watch out, though,'cause some people won't be happy if
you succeed...
The game has 4 different shipwrecks. Each time you start a new game, one
shipwreck is chosen automatically by the computer, so every time you restart
you usually face a different challenge. The shipwrecks are:
The "SAO VERA", a Portuguese cargo vessel sunk in 1698.
The H.M.S."INTRANSIGENT", a British frigate sunk in 1766.
"THE FIANNA" (ex.name"GLORIA DIEU"), a British tea clipper sunk in 1887.
And the S.S."LEVIATHAN", an American express steamship (which looked like the
Titanic) sunk in 1916 by a German warship.
Difficulty level: STANDARD
Some special commands you should know:
PUSH (something) TO THE (direction) - this one will prove useful...
WITHDRAW $(some amount of money) - from your bank account!
Other commands to have in mind:
ATTACK BREAK BUY CLIMB CLOSE
CUT DIVE DRINK DROP EAT
EXAMINE GIVE INSERT JUMP LOCK
PULL READ RENT SLEEP TAKE
TURN OFF TURN ON WEDGE WIND YELL
O.K. when you first loaded this one you could see all the new improvements
that Infocom did to "modernize" its adventures:
First of all, a fastloader was included and the game asked you if you were
"Loading from a Commodore 1541 disk drive?" in order to use it.
Second: The loading message "Loading game ..." was replaced by the more
classy "The story is loading ..."
Third: Infocom desided to adopt a gray background with white text (black for
the top location/score line and cursor). No more blues!
Fourth: the cursor became a thin line, like the cursor of MS DOS.
Fifth: a sound effect was heard when you typed a letter, and another one if
you pressed a cursor key, or you tried to move the cursor with DEL past the
beginning of the command entry line (no more messing around!).
Sixth: the game wouldn't freeze after quit...it would restart! (So, you still
had to turn off your computer--I wonder, were they promoting reset switches?)
And Seventh: Added support for the new Commodore Plus 4! Wow! (However, soon
the PLUS4 were abandoned...)
COMMODORE EMULATOR NOTE: It is not recommended to play any Infocom game on CCS64, since
there is no way to turn off its 1541 emulation and the games load too slow.
On C64S, Vice, and PC64, though, any Infocom game will load instantly and you
will notice no delay for loading new text while playing, making the gameplay
much more enjoyable!
ALSO REMEMBER to answer NO at the Loading-from-a-1541 question, in order to
maintain high-speed emulator loading!
Well, that's all!
Best Regards
Dimitris